He's got a right to say the death penalty is wrong

He walks alone a lot. Loses himself in work. Spends time in church. Lately, he's ventured out to talk to high school students and, if he's asked, he will testify before legislators about ending the death penalty.

"If I can help someone else, that helps the pain," says Byron Halsey, 46. "No one should have to go through what I did."

His pain?

The brutal rape and murder in 1985 of two children he considered his own, the children of his girlfriend. Then his arrest for the crimes, his conviction and imprisonment for 20 years, barely missing the death penalty, but facing the rest of his life in prison -- a convicted child-killer, a detested member of an unforgiving population.

"I was on top of everybody's list," says Halsey. "Just took a few days before someone jumped me."

And he didn't do it, just as he had said all along.

Couldn't have done it, according to DNA evidence that not only excluded him as the killer but pointed directly to another man -- a neighbor who testified against Halsey and then was free to commit at least two more brutal rapes before he was finally jailed.

Halsey has been reluctant to tell his story since his release in May, to allow himself again to be the target of attention, the way he was during his trial in Elizabeth.

"They said I was a monster, everybody wanted to stone me," he says. And when, in an obvious jury compromise, he was spared death, people in the courtroom booed.

"They wanted me dead."

One newspaper -- not this one -- ran the picture of the post-mortem X-ray taken of one of the murdered children. Tyrone Urquhart, 7, had been killed by someone hammering nails into his head. His sister, Tina, 8, had been strangled and raped.

"I loved those kids and they said I killed them and I know I didn't."

His lawyer, Vanessa Potkin of the Innocence Project in New York, says Halsey, now 47, was "victimized twice -- once by losing his children, and again by being falsely convicted of their murders."

Halsey was an easy man to blame for murder. He is literally a born loser -- brought into the world in a prison for women where his mother was sent for the crime of fornication.

He spent his childhood in foster care -- and, often, in trouble. Halsey never got beyond the sixth grade and was considered learning disabled. He had a record -- "crazy, stupid stuff," he says -- and served eight months in a county jail for burglary.

Still, there was nothing in his record to suggest he was a sexual predator -- although there was plenty in the record of the man eventually identified as matching the DNA of the children's killers. Halsey was just an easier target.

Also, he confessed after 30 hours of questioning in a 40-hour period.

"I just wanted the cops to leave me alone," says Halsey, who was interrogated after spending the night searching for the children he was later convicted of murdering -- children, who, prosecutors say now, were murdered by a neighbor.

Potkin says Halsey believed that, once the police found more evidence, he would be freed and the confession wouldn't mean anything. The transcript of the interrogation shows Halsey talking what a police officer would later term "gibberish."

"I didn't write that," he says. "I signed what the cops wrote."

Potkin says about a quarter of all innocent but convicted murderers confess. Halsey repudiated the confession at his 1987 trial but it was admitted into evidence.

Prosecutors sought the death penalty but, after five days of deliberation, the jury returned with verdicts convicting him of non-capital homicide -- an unintentional killing.

"The verdict made no sense," says Potkin. "How do you not intend to kill someone by driving nails into his head? It was clearly a compromise to the holdouts to vote for a conviction."

The Legislature, during its lame-duck session, is expected to vote on a measure repealing the death penalty in New Jersey. A coalition of organizations -- including the Innocence Project -- is pressing for passage of the bill.

"I think they should. I could have been killed, and I was innocent."

But what of the man who killed the children he considered his own? What if that person turns out -- as suspected -- to be the man who testified against him, sending him to jail for murders he didn't commit?